MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

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I Don’t Have Anything to Blog for Today, Help!

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Most people get into this thing called as “writer’s block” wherein they cannot get a topic they can write about. Literally nothing comes out of their mind, zero, zilch! I had experienced it too and in fact I did more than 10 times already.

There has been really some good and lengthy guides out there discussing how to cope up with writer’s block and if you came across some of those and you find them helpful then I suggest you to bookmark them so you have a copy of it which you can reference back continuously.

Anyways in this post, I want to share my unique take on how I deal with it and what I usually do when I literally have nothing in my mind to blog about.

1. If you don’t feel writing, then don’t!

Well this is the basic thing to do. I mean why force yourself to write if you don’t like or feel writing?

This was really my motto since the day I created this blog and many other blogs. If I’m not in the mood then I wouldn’t. After all it’s nice to show a great post which is quite of not the latest rather than show a latest yet crappy low quality ones that will harm your blog more than benefit it.

2. Go outside, Relax

With the first one, obviously you can’t just refrain from writing forever and expect to get same readership after a month or two. That being considered, I’d usually go outside, maybe in the mall and relax. This small thing can help you get back on track and hopefully get some ideas for your posts.

A good rest also helps since no one of us wants to get burned out writing that we end up not enjoying it at all.

3. Read other Stuffs

If you’re still not back in writing mode, you can simply just browse the blogosphere, go to your favorite blogs in your niche and just read and observe what’s going on. Eventually by still being connected and updated to the blogosphere, it can help you think of the topics or just get you involved to maybe write on the current trends or simply just have an opinion on whats currently in.

Those are my 3-step process. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? I feel fortunate that I can crank out blog articles one after another and with that I really don’t struggle that much with producing content for my blog/s.

But then I know a lot of people who struggle with this. And I hope the 3 step process I outlined above can somehow help you break the writers block. How about you? Do you have any other strategies that you may want to share with me?

Being *Just* a Marketer & Not an Internet Guy

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In the internet marketing world, I see three different kinds of people. The first kind is a techie person who knows a lot about the internet but does not have any knowledge in marketing. Basically this is where most people are coming from. Second is the type of person who has offline marketing experience but hasn’t really have much idea on how the internet works and third, is a someone who does not know either, meaning a newbie or newcomer.

I’ve been into this space now for quite a while and I’ve noticed a lot of things. Most of which is directly related to internet marketers who aren’t that geeky enough to understand the internet.

Remember my post on how to easily steal an eBook? That’s just one of them. I mean that post was even outdated by now yet a lot of people still seem to fail to comply to that. Just take the simple way of hiding their eBook from public access is something that most of them, if not us, could not do.

Why this is a Big issue?

I know most marketers would say that “who cares? my customers aren’t geeky so Im just contented” This is a big issue just because of the fact that there’s so much ripping and fraud going around. I mean if an eBook you badly want becomes available for free on some blackhat type of forum, are you still gonna pay for it?

How about a membership site where you can literally access it even without you being a member? These days there are so many tools that are available (not for free of course) that can really help you with this thing. Being a marketer and not an internet guy, you can always seek help from people who know more about these technical details.

How about free reports to build your list? It’s funny because I’m seeing quite a lot of people offering freebie in exchange for an email but the thing is that freebie is freely available even without giving up your email. Yes, most people fail at this.

The Solution

Well this is a very broad topic and the solution would have easily been very lengthy if I state it all here. The best way to see if people can rip your files off is to simply just become that *other people. I mean why not do a thorough search on your own stuff and see if you can get it for free. If it’s the case, then it’s a major problem for you.

It also does pay to ask for help in related forums where people do the same thing. For instance, if you’re an eBook whore seller, then maybe hang out quite a bit in Warriors Forum and see if people can provide you some help.  These people are just in the same situation as you and as I’ve people in forums are always ready to help.

Lastly there’s a lot of tools out there to help you. If you’re doing a business online, having all of those needed tools is a worthy investment after all (even if they’re expensive). Would you rather not spend money and lose a lot of money with your product getting freely shared or the other way around? Again, it may be hard for you if you’re not a “tech” person to make those third party tools to work but that’s why you outsource right?

I’d like to of course get your take with this subject matter. I’m sure most you do the same thing as I do and  have you found any tools and techniques that you can recommend to the community?

And lastly, are you just being a marketer and not an “internet guy” as a whole?

Major Contest Announcement and Some Guest Posting Opps

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The MelvinBlog Best Blog Marketing Tip Contest has finally come to a close and I can really really see it as a major success. Just with the fact that all entries are superb entries that it exceeded my expectations is a reason good enough to call this contest a success. And add to that, the massive interaction between the community of those blogs who participated in the contest. So again I’d like to thank the sponsors by presenting this uber big banner.

Best Blog Contest

As I’ve said, that’s the goal of this contest. Sure it gave me a lot of traction for the entire 1 month of holding this one but it’s just all about the other intrinsic benefits I guess. So right now, I’m going to announce the winners.

And the winners are…

Congratulations to… uh oh! not so fast.. Actually as for the request of some of the contestant and as mainstream as it may sound, I am going to extend this contest. Yes, extend this!

I’m sorry if I spoiled you as I know you’re really excited to hear if you’re one of the winners but after much discussion with some of the sponsors, the contest will be extended up to July 25, meaning you still have 9 more days to either get as much people to read your contest entry or write another killer blog marketing tip to increase your chances of winning.

Another reason for that is the mini side-in contests. Do you remember that when I opened this contest I announced  that there will be a lot of side-in type of contest? The reason Im extending this is because I still have some really nice exciting small contest for you in the coming days, so stay tuned!

If you haven’t joined yet, what are you waiting for, enter the contest and get a chance to win over $2000 of REAL prizes at stake.

Looking for Guest Writers

I don’t really want to do this but I have to since I’m still trying to figure out managing my time for work and for business.  I’m now officially accepting guest post entries for this blog again. All you have to do is register for an account and then wait for me to upgrade your account. After all is done, you can now write your articles inside my wp-dashboard. That’s it.

I don’t want to put “what to post” and “what not to” here but obviously in order to land a guest post here in this blog, you have to submit a high-quality and unique guest article. Of course, I reserve the right to accept or reject articles if I feel they don’t meet my taste but rest assure, I’ll let you know about it.

So I guess that’s it for now. I made 2 announcements in this post and I’m sure there will be a lot of clarifications so just let me know through the comment form.

An Interesting Guest Post Analysis on FamousBloggers

An Interesting Guest Post Analysis on FamousBloggers

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We all know that guest posting brings in real traffic if done correctly. As a member of my community, you’re probably also aware on how I’ve been guest posting on a lot of blogs for the past few months for now. I have done a lot of guest post but I realized I haven’t really done any analysis on the effects of this guest posts for my blog. And while it’s impossible to do one posts for all guest posts I’ve done, I think it would make more sense to at least try to pick one and feature it every week. What do you think?

Anyways, I’ve been trying to do 5 guest posts per month and its a level I’m trying to maintain for now. If you can remember I made a commitment to take this blog to the next level but increasing my efforts. However, that took a hit after my current employment. Nevertheless here’s an interesting analysis of my guest post in FamousBloggers.com

What is FamousBloggers?

FamousBloggers is multi-author blog which is blogging in topics related to online business. It’s a relatively *new blog. I said new because it has just been in the blogosphere for less than one year yet it has already made so much strides and it has a good overall community behind it. Hesham and his community is one of the very few teams in the blogosphere who are serious in taking their whole thing to new heights.

If you know me I love testing out different traffic sources and experimenting. You may probably have seen me do couple of guest posts for high traffic blogs like John Chow and also you’ve seen me in smaller blogs as well. Guest posting for FamousBloggers is really intriguing to me for a couple of reasons. First is that its a new source of traffic as I’m sure most of the readers their haven’t heard my blog and second, I want to build  a good relationship not just with the blog but with their community.

Guest Post Analysis

I’ve done about three guest posts on FamousBloggers.com for the past few months and there’s really some interesting number I am seeing. Before that, let’s just first analyze how’s the return on a normal John Chow guest post considering that Chow’s blog is one of the most high traffic blogs around in this niche.

johnchow guest post

The reason I showed you the statistics from Chow’s guest post is because we are going to use his blog as the barometer. John’s blog is always an interesting cover for me in the subject of guest posting first is because he gets so many traffic yet these traffic are mostly trigger-lucky readers who read myriads of content everyday. Usually they end up bouncing up too quickly on most blogs just because of where they’re coming from.

Another thing is that John’s posting frequency is always weird. Sometimes you can get your post in there for more than 24 hours but most of the times, it can be there for less than 6 hours. That’s why stats always fluctuate and with that, you always need to have some sort of perfect timing to maximize your traffic with his blog.

Now as for FamousBloggers, I did start guest posting for that site last May and initially I don’t think there’s that many people in that community that were aware of my blog. Here are the initial stats:

FamousBloggers guest post

As you can see with the numbers, back then nearly all of his readers don’t know my blog so its a whopping 94% new visits. I got a fairly good amount of traffic with 50 unique hits for that one guest posts and some followup comments throughout the entire month. Another nice return here is the page/visit stat. This is one of my determiner on whether the guest post is worth it or not. As you can see, each user nearly has visited 4 pages of my blog so it’s nearly 200 pageviews for that guest post and for me it’s an always nice indication.

After that one guest post I tried doing some other more to have a bigger picture on what I can really get on that blog in terms of exposure.

Now there’s a weird stuff here as far as this specific stat is concern. I was getting over 5 views per visit yet my bounce rate is 51.61%. Again the discussion between the difference between bounce rate and exit rate has been there for years. Anyways I’m still happy with the turnout of it thus far since I’m not getting a massive traffic yet, it’s targeted. Another thing that you can notice is that the % of new visits has gone down which means the goal of my guest posting campaigns there is already met.

But of course, it still doesn’t stop there. Just late last month up to this month, Hesham launched a $3500 cash contest and obviously I joined that considering the fact I’m obsessed with contest.

However, I was quite curious since if it’s a contest then maybe it could prove my theory that guest blogging contests really differs from normal guest posting campaigns in which not a lot of people really convert mainly because all they care about is the contest and not the intrinsic reasoning behind a guest post. Either way, I booked my spot and wrote a definitive guest post on blog commenting. Here’s how it turned out:

And it turns out I was right. 🙂 I got the most comment and retweet in that post but that’s simply because it’s a community contest and so the whole community was trying to help me out as well. But as far as converting them to click my author bio and go to my blog, not that much.

However, one thing I was happy about is that most of the readers of that blog are not anymore new to MelvinBlog. I started out with a new visits percentage of 94% and now its amazingly down to 13% which is really nice thing to have. Again the traffic wasn’t ever massive but conversion is everything and I can get 10 people to subscribe to my blog then its certainly better than 1000 bouncing readers.

How I do and prepare for that

Well most bloggers just do their guest post and leave it up in the air but I always prefer to welcome those new audience in the most polite way I can.

As I have been preaching for a long time, a landing page is a must. It’s because new visitors may not always like your current posts and if you direct them to your best posts instead, then you’re giving them an option to explore more which should be your goal anyways. Here’s a nice screenshot (again) of the my traffic when I direct people to my landing page:

So there ya go. You can see that by getting them to that page, they get to explore more and there’s a high chance that they will subscribe to your blog or follow you for quite a while. Heck even those who came from Google didn’t bounce that quick.

FamousBloggers Guest Post Conclusion

Actually there’s no conclusion yet, since I’m still going to do occassional guest posts on that blog. But for the moment it’s all good. One thing that blog has is an interactive community wherein you’ll expect almost 30+ comments on each and every of your guest posts. So with that, I know that I’m posting articles to real people, not just bots.

Drawbacks is that Hesham and his folks publish articles on an everyday basis so like John Chow’s blog, you get to have a small time in the featured area which is at the top. But even though, you can still get your guest post in their front page for almost a week so that’s still maximum exposure there.

Lesson learned here is to always look for new traffic sources. I mean last year this blog is unknown, and this year it’s one of the most popular blogs in this niche. You’ll never know so you just gotta keep finding that new traffic source and see how you can cater to it.

Now the mic up to you? Have yout tried guest posting on FamousBloggers? or maybe you can share some of your experience with guest posts?

Joining Blog Contests, What’s Your Motivational Factor?

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Contests or specifically blog contests are a great way to attract a huge number of people from a wide variety of demographics. Not only because its full of hype, but more likely because almost everyone joins it.

I’m sure you’re aware that I join as much contest as I can and bragging aside, I usually win a lot. From the simple, “subscribe to feed, comment here” type of contest to the harder affiliate marketing competitions, I probably had participated in all of those. Joining contest is really fun in the sense that if you lose, then you lose. I mean people don’t grudge when they lose in contests, instead they ponder on how it’s super fun and how they learned a lot. Another benefit is that it really brings you closer to other bloggers.

I know like me, you also like joining contests probably for the same reason and amazingly for me I don’t just join contests giving iPads or whatever gadgets, I literally join each and every as much as I could. Even if the prize is a Flip Mino or a simple quality eBook or even just a template, I am usually urged to participate.

I love Competing

This pretty much sums it up. I’m a gamer and I’m ready to compete all the time and every time I look back I always see this as a determining factor. I joined a lot of affiliate marketing contests by Market Leverage and I won I think 3 of them. For me it’s just nice to compete with all these people around the world doing the same thing with me and proving them something (I’m sure they’re proving something too!).

When I join contests, I don’t just carry my name and my blog but also my country. Philippines is a third-world country but what a lot of people don’t know about us is that we’re good. I mean again bragging aside, we’re good. There are a lot of marketers here who literally kill it with whatever business model and I know a lot of bloggers here who are really well-known internationally.

They say competition is always good because it just means there’s money in it. The same goes with contests. When you see you’re up against someone, you have that determination inside you to win it all. And the best thing is that you don’t treat others as a competitor, instead you treat him as a peer.

Feeds our ego well

If you’re winning, it satisfies us ego-wise. Who doesn’t want to get recognized as someone who emerged victorious in a contest? It helps you build your online portfolio, your image and you get more chance for people to visit you because you won the contest.

A good example is Lyndon Reid who won the shoemoney’s gambler contest. He won the contest so he got the prize of attending the summit for free and an additional cash but on a side note, he received so much traction because big blogger like John Chow blogged for him as well.

Prizes are good, too good to be true

In one of my old posts about how to make money outside internet marketing, I mentioned that joining blog contests is a good nice way to go. I mean seriously, how hard is it to actually tweet something or blog about it? Is it hard to write an entry to a contest? Seriously, oftentimes its just so worth it.

John Chow has had a post about this entitled “Are you scared of success” in which he pointed out how people are scared of joining contests. That is so true and I think there’s another factor that hinges with that and its a word called “laziness”. That’s a good point too since most people want to succeed but almost none can move, no one can really do anything.

What do you think? What’s your main driving point on why you join contests?

FamousBloggers & ComLuv Contest = Insane Contest

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FamousBloggers ComLuv ContestI know I myself here have started an insane contest but the guys over at FamousBloggers.com and Comluv.com are more insane than me and they started this really big contest wherein there’s literally over $3000+ of cash prize at stake. Yep, it’s CASH prize, not anything else but cash. So if you’re trying to be too good to be true and you want that cash to spend on maybe a gadget rather than one year of hosting or something equivalent of that, then  make sure you check out the contest.

Ok since there’s no length required for this post, here are now the sponsors for the said contest:

Contest Sponsors

This is the FamousBloggers ComLuv Contest Sponsors, feel free to check them out, also check the Online Contest page for more information. Special thank to Gail our Social Media Marketing Strategist for the great work.

$300 SPONSORS

The ComLuv Network

ComLuv Network

Claims.com specialists in road traffic accidents Claims and Compensation

$150 SPONSORS

$100 SPONSORS:

$50 Sponsors

There ya go. I know some of the guys, bloggers on the sponsors list but majority is pretty new to me but I guess Hesham and Andy had verified these folks’ genuineness so I don’t think we’ll ever have a problem claiming our prizes. 😉

Why I’m Joining?

I believe I made mention of it already on my blog post about contests but just to repeat, its because I just love joining contests. I love the prizes, I love the competition, I crave for hearing my name announced as a winner and its a good time to network with a lot of people as well.

As you being a part of my community, I’m expecting your support here for me. So far I have written these X  (meaning this can add up soon) amount of articles and to show support all you have to do is comment on those articles and tweet it for me.

That’s it for now folks! The article may add up or not. Again, I highly suggest you to read the article and if you like it, let me know!

Niche Research & The Internet Time Machine

Niche Research & The Internet Time Machine

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This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of TheInternetTimeMachine. All opinions are 100% mine.

If you’ve been reading this for a while, you probably have noticed me tell you a lot that in order to be profitable, you need to have a niche. To be more specific, you need to be in a good niche.

I’ve been into this internet marketing niche for 3 years already and even though it isn’t as long as some people have been into, I could easily say that I’ve learned a lot. My first crack of niche selection was when I started a basketball blog. It was a failure for half a year before I was able to turn it around and make it profitable but still it’s not a niche that I could really make a ton of money with and I realized that immediately.

I then moved on to affiliate marketing where I made a ton of money. Now what I’m talking about here is the PPC- cpa affiliate marketing where I would push lets say a quiz type of offer to Adwords or MSN and then either make or lose money. This is where I learned the true value of niche research. In as much as most of us would like to just follow our passion and make money, unfortunately it’s not possible. Doing an extensive research first to find a profitable place to start with is always crucial and overall, niche marketing is a must-step for any kind of business model

Meet NowRelevant & Internet Time Machine

NowRelevant is some sort kind of a search engine that allows you to do extensive searches for your niche. Now this company just launched a software and service called The Internet Time Machine. What is this all about? Short answer is for tactical niche research. What TITM  does is collect the hottest keywords for the past 24 hours. These are either for SEO-types of guys where they more rely on organic rankings or for PPC guys like me who want to get the latest trend. Look:

internet time machine

You can run three different types of searches. One is for SEO-targeted, two is the latest trends which mostly focuses on PPC and third is something that I find unique, the core trend analysis. This type of analysis is mostly targeted to what people are looking to buy right now. Whether it is accurate or not, I would leave it up to you when you try it I guess.

Affiliate Marketing Contest with $20,000 at stake

So to spice things up for their launch, these folks decided to run a massive Internet Marketing Contest wherein you can take home, at minimum, $10,000 all yours! Actually there will just be two winners so each of them will take home 10 grands. How sweet is that?

The contest is open to all I believe and the contest is basically all about creativity and planning skills. The winner of the contest will receive $10,000 and the one who referred the winner will equally receive the same amount. Now what’s easier?

Now there’s a video that’s dedicated to it and I don’t want to spoil that. Here’s the video:


Visit my sponsor: Smarter Search